My budget for each campaign was arbitrarily set to $25 a day. All the keywords said "active" but the comments varied from campaign to campaign. Most said I met my daily budget limit, but most were not even close.
I waited until after midnight and everything is still frozen, but now the comments say, I am not ranking high enough, yet I increased them all to well over the suggested range.
I checked Google Analytics and found some very suspicious information. I paid for 119 clicks, my best campaign was running 3.9% (this was all in two hours); however Analytics says:
130 visits
115 unique visitors
58 paid visits?
101 visits under 10 seconds!
44 visits were 0:00 seconds?
Only 6 of the 119 stayed on the site more than 10 seconds!
The site is highly relevant with plenty of information, news, forums, search tool, and 100 or so related merchants. There is no way that this makes any sense?
I sent them an email an hour ago. I noticed now impressions are very slowly showing up again.
Seems like some people are paid to just click and click and click....? At this rate it doesn't seem worth the effort.
I always wondered how Google’s server room(s) looks like. ;)
Now, one of the things that is never precise is daily budget. If Google AdWords somehow promised to match your daily budged to or around a penny, they would be blamed all the time for not doing it. With all these searches across the globe, how would they be able to match your settings 100%. By the time the system figures you are at your $25 you may receive another 50 or 500 clicks. What then?
So far, this is what we learned about daily budget:
It takes time for the system to “learn” how your campaign would be performing and to predict how many clicks your campaign would receive in any time unit throughout the day.
Google AdWords rather slows down your campaign as it approaches your daily limit (in the way how they see it) and you are likely to see your ads being kind of stopped when you are maybe at $12 or $16, rather then at $24.
Ad diagnostic tool sometimes claims your ads are not showing because you’ve reached your daily budget although you know you did not.
One of the most important facts is that based on your daily limit, AdWords calculates your cumulative monthly budget and behaves according to that. 30x25=750 and it will spread it over the month. This means that you may spend $30 during one day which is over your budget but you will not receive a credit. A credit will be given only if you are over $750 for a month.
If you really want to spend up top around $25, you are better with putting a limit anywhere between 35 and 50. Then watch and adjust as needed.
No warranty on these claims.
Here is the catch, my daily total campaign budget is $335.00 and when I woke up this morning the system did the same exact thing, it ran until it spent $50 and stopped.
On the other side of the coin this may be a blessing as if I find 90% of tha paid clicks are nothing more than a 00:00:00 second click, I am just paying Google for some boiler clicking room.
Reg. Budget
In my experience, currently working with AdWords requires continuous control and monitoring. It is not guaranteed that Google will use up all your budgets immediately. It is now more of a matter of trust and past history. I seem to think that adWords uses this staggerred growth of impressions to 'control' the volume of traffic it sends in order to maybe weed out the dodgy sites. Patience is the key, as impressions and clicks grow slowly on the content network and also SEARCH. It may take a while before your budgets are 'met' and then you will get suggestions to INCREASE budget to get more clicks as the system gives your sites the 'green' light.
Reg. Quality of visitors.
I can only speak from personal experience which is very good. If the site is good, there is no reason for the visitor not to stay for long. Make sure the viistors land on landing pages which are correctly described in the ads. Another suggestion, would be to block out the social networking sites which send a lot of impressions and poor quality visitors using your adWords interface.
The visitor behaviour you are describing is more like what you would get with third level PPC service providers ( are you using them also?) not adWords.
I got a little bit weird experience also, soon after the maintenance.
I agree that disabling the Content Network option to reduce budget may be good option, but after doing that, no clicks landed on my site (comparing the previous results).
Is that really Content Network is bad on conversion rate? Even if we already set Position Preference?
I did not have the Content Networks checked or any county except USA. The ads are highly relevant and the landing pages are on topic.
On day three it got even more wierd with many words knocked off for low quality and price increases of 2x to 10x just to play. Some words went to $5.00 and on day four without any reason the same words dropped to $0.40. The whole thing is psycho and obviousl bent to the big spenders who want their position locked in. I don't mind being 4, 5, or 6, but I actually saw 137 on some words which is laughable.
It's reminding me of e-Bay. A great idea driven to insanity where people bid more than they want at Nordstrum because they don't want to lose. The same mentality is alive and well on Google. I have not ventured into Yahoo and MSN yet, but I am sure lala land is alive and well there too.
I don't mind setting a budget and testing and getting a wee bit of ROI, but this is a game of random chance. At least if I place an ad in the newspaper I can see it everyday and probably in the same spot. With this game, the ad may or may not appear and you never know where it will appear or for how long. I think the bubble is going to break again very soon.
It is interesting that I had a $75 Google ad credit from my hosting provider and all of it was clicked away with 00:00:00 clicks. Some promotion.
I have other sites runnning with 12% click through so none of this is new to me except the very strange and disappointing behavior of this project.
I paused everhting and will try rethinking the whole mess. Thanks.
But as for your first post, I have had the same thing happen a few times when starting a new account, it spends 50 dollars then stops until the next day. I have spoken to my adwords rep in the past about this and it is due to a manual approval process, I suspect this is initiated when you are trying to advertise advertise on certain sensitive terms.
It will resume and start spending its budget after this process has been completed, but if your in a hurry you should get in contact with your rep, if you have one.
[edited by: Malako at 9:18 am (utc) on Oct. 23, 2007]
Also yesterday I saw Adwords results that were a significant increment above my norm, which usually vary by 1-2%. Yesterday's spike was 12%. At this point, I don't feel the numbers I am seeing are accurate. Too many anomalies. Too many error messages.
